How The Ten Commandments Are Numbered

commandments, ten, numbered, how(1) Josephus is the first witness for the division now common among Protestants (except Lutherans), namely, (a) foreign gods, (b) images, (c) name of God, (d) Sabbath, (e) parents, (f) murder, (g) adultery, (h) theft, (i) false witness, (j) coveting. Before him, Philo made the same arrangement, except that he followed the Septuagint in putting adultery before murder. This mode of counting was current with many of the church Fathers, and is now in use in the Greek Catholic church and with most Protestants.

(2) Augustine combined foreign gods and images (Exo 20:2-6) into one commandment and following the order of Deu 5:21 (Hebrew 18) made the 9th commandment a prohibition of the coveting of a neighbor's wife, while the 10th prohibits the coveting of his house and other property. Roman Catholics and Lutherans accept Augustine's mode of reckoning, except that they follow the order in Exo 20:17, so that the 9th commandment forbids the coveting of a neighbor's house, while the 10th includes his wife and all other property.

(3) A third mode of counting is that adopted by the Jews in the early Christian centuries, which became universal among them in the Middle Ages and so down to the present time. According to this scheme, the opening statement in Exo_20:2 is the “first word,” Exo 20:3-6 the second (combining foreign gods with images), while the following eight commandments are as in the common Protestant arrangement.

The division of the prohibition of coveting into two commandments is fatal to the Augustinian scheme; and the reckoning of the initial statement in Exo 20:2 as one of the “ten words” seems equally fatal to the modern Jewish method of counting. The prohibition of images, which is introduced by the solemn formula, “Thou shalt not,” is surely a different “word” from the command to worship no god other than Yahweh. Moreover, if nine of the “ten words” are commandments, it would seem reasonable to make the remaining “word” a commandment, if this can be done without violence to the subjectmatter. See Eerdmaus, The Expositor, July, 1909, 21 ff.


This biblical study was taken from the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia
Edited by James Orr, published in 1939 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co